The writers who appeared in Die Zeit are less the vanguard than the symptom of this development. This is reflected in the Pegida movement and the newly formed protest party Alternative for Germany (AfD), and on the other hand in the growing readiness of the middle-class to stand up more actively than before for democracy, the rule of law and an open society. And in fact the events of 20 – the Ukraine crisis, ISIS terrorism, the euro and refugee issues – have caused a politicization of German society. If a significant number of writers were to cleave to this goal, then a “committed literature” (Jean-Paul Sartre) would again be the order of the day. Specifically, this means to name those responsible for the state of the world and to expose in narrative the inner laws behind current political events. It’s an elemental necessity, for narrative as well as for politics, to make at least suggestions about causality.”

Ulrich Peltzer went one step further and made complexity itself the motive of narrative: “If you say it’s all so complex, in the end there isn’t any longer an immediate causality we can make out, then I say: No, that’s not true. Literature, they were agreed, had the obligation to point to the “inner contradictions of the ruling system” and, beyond appeals, signature campaigns and essays, to shape reality in its narratives.

In an interview in the literary supplement on the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair in the weekly Die Zeit, three German writers proclaimed a “return” to politics: Jenny Erpenbeck, Ulrich Peltzer and Ilija Trojanow pilloried the prevailing “paltry solutions of pragmatism” and called for a rehabilitation of utopian “grand narratives”.

Yet the debates take place mainly in the features section. The crisis in Europe, the confrontation with refugees: not only German society but also German literature is undergoing politicization. Their books deal with social topics: Juli Zeh and Ilija Trojanow | Photo (detail): © Isolde Ohlbaum

Das bessere Leben by Ulrich Peltzer